chainbb.com - going offlinesteemCreated with Sketch.

It's a hard decision, but at this point I feel it's the right one to make. As I alluded to in my potential witness roadmap, I'm currently focusing on other needed aspects of the ecosystem and haven't given proper attention to chainbb.com or it's users. This has been a constant source of stress for me, as morally I feel that I can't just ignore problems when they arise with the site.

Today, after running into issues with chainbb's servers and the steemd node powering it, I decided to shut down the site and refund anyone who's actually sent any funds to create/fund a forum.

If you're one of the chainbb users who has created a forum, you'll find a refund transfer for each transfer you made to the @chainbb account with a memo explaining what it was a refund for. These refunds were sent back to the account sent the transfer, or in the case that it was sent from an exchange, sent to the owner of the forum.

All pages on chainbb.com now display a message about the site shutting down, and I'll very likely shut down the servers in the near future (before the next billing cycle).

To date it's still my favorite way to interact with the Steem blockchain and while I'm sad to see it shut down, this will give me breathing room to move onto other priorities while not feeling a sense of neglect towards a platform that I feel I should be maintaining better. I still believe the chainBB model is a solid concept and may revisit it as some point, but I make no promises. If and when it is revisited, I imagine the next version of it will end up using the tools that I am creating today, which will allow it to do all the things that I wish it could do today.

Don't worry I have a feeling some people will come buy it and resurrect it with some extra stuff ooooh weee I'm so excited thinkin about it man! Ill be on discord if you want to talk about it call me anytime man, it was cool seein you in steemspeak.com discord i see a lot of promise in sooo many dapps for steem its so fuckin cool an I can talk about it for so long I can just make anything that may feel boring look SUPER exciting man I swear! Lol

@jesta you are the man. @chainbb was brilliant and helped me grow drastically in the time I used it. It was much easier to search for specific content than other gateways. Call me a greedy capitalist but I will forever cherish those days when you were auto-upvoting every comment made through chainbb. It motivated me to reach out and comment on other peoples work and it was a big factor in my account growth. I look forward to seeing what else you have in store! Thanks for the refund on the forum category and thank you for providing us with ChainBB (and the source!)

Ah, bummers. I know this was your baby, and you put so much into it. It's certainly sad to see it go, but you do have to set and maintain priorities in order to stay as effective as you have been. You are a productive machine!

I hope someone else sees the value in this technology and takes it upon themselves to run with it. I wasn't personally a big fan of the forum style comment threading (too many lost days in bitcointalk, I guess), but I loved supporting and promoting ChainBB because I believed in the work you were doing and thought it was an excellent example of what's possible with the STEEM blockchain beyond just Steemit.

Yeah, I poured a lot of time and effort last year into it and had some high hopes.

The learning experience alone was worth it in the end, giving this entire situation a net positive from my point of view. Actually building a social interface for Steem has really helped me evaluate what I believe a platform like Steem needs to succeed.

It's indeed a tough decision to make, but I'm pretty sure it was the right one.

I have a team ready to pick up chainBB and I hope all existing sponsors will please contact me on steem.chat or telegram or wire.
I have chatted up jesta but did not hear back yet so far.
I would love to speak with anyone interested in working on it or sponsoring it, or working on new features design, UX, etc.
I can set up QA, tech support and do it right, but i'd like all the input that exists today to start it.
we have it running in docker, but need a lot of hosting consulting, and current user issues priorities list, known problems, etc.

Damn, it was the best interface to steem for me... I understand your reasons though, and I really appreciate your being so clean and honest: people refunded, project open sourced, you are walking out of it as a sir, hands down.

Sorry to see it go. I talked to you about skinning it but then xmas and steemcleaners happened and I never got a chance to sit down and work on that. Chainbb is one of the best frontends the blockchain had, far better than everything came after it.

Sorry to hear this. The forum style seemed rather retro, but you were ahead of Steemit with the potential to onboard communities and share revenue with them. I hope someone with business acumen considers this because it really could be expanded, though I know you are busy with a lot of projects.

Is there already any plugin or solution for other normal forums to use the Steem blockchain for rewards of its users ?
I need a solution that I can rrun on my own domain.
What about the SMT tokens ? any solution now already to put them into a forum like Elkarte.net ot SMF or simular Forums ?
Is anybody offering already a solution for this ?
where can stay informed about this, as I need to restart my forums now and would like to integrate Steem into them.
Many thanks.
Regards, Stefan.

No, there's no plugin you can just add to an existing forum to use the Steem blockchain currently. It'd be a complicated integration, which is why chainBB was it's own forum software and not a plugin for something existing.

Do you know someone or is here someone reading who could port the new Smart Media Tokens
to thehttps://elkarte.net
forum software ?
This I will now going to use, as it is a very nice and better version than simplemachines forum software
that I used before and also has good mobile phone support...
But I really would like to have also an option to upvote postings inside the forum via the steemit blockchain, so my members could be rewarded for their postings...
I am also willing to finance such a plugin... Maybe it would be easier to do the synchronisation only once
per day with the blockchain via a cronjob that collects the internal Elkarte Like button statuses once every day and puts it onto the blockchain...??
Please contact me, if someone is willing to put work into this.
Many thanks in advance.
Regards, Stefan.

Dear @Jesta, I'm sorry you had to make this difficult decision but I honor and respect you for doing what you feel is right. I also am thankful for the refund for https://www.chainbb.com/f/myhuntingfishing and the other forums I had started for our small but growing community @myhuntingfishing. I am sure your work will continue to benefit us all as you re-prioritize. Thanks for being a class act.

The plan currently is to replace steemdb with a better version of itself :)

I've been working on ways to more efficiently process blockchain data for the last couple weeks. I've hit a few bumps in the road with it, but am talking with the Steemit devs on ways to fix those issues.

I didnt use chainbb but i just visited the site and was awsome @jesta i am feeling sad for the reason it has been shutdown. I hope you will reipen in future bcz great things are always take more care and energy to handle.

@jesta
I just logged on to chainbb to do my replies as it's the best platform for me to follow up comments and replies in steemit but I was shocked to find this post. Reading through your reasons makes me understand the immense pressure you on currently on many other projects. I must thank you for using chainbb to touch many lives in steemit through several upvotes of which I and many folks I know benefited. You always my top witness and now in near future you come back strong with chainbb concept or handover to someone you trust.
In anycase, withing you more success

Thank you for sharing! Links to your post and info about the service going offline were included in the Steem.center wiki pages ChainBB, Steem Ecosystem and Steem Ecosystem: A - L. Thanks and good luck in your new projects again!

I never got around to using ChainBB, though I've heard a lot of good things about it, and it looks like you have plenty of good comments about it here.

Still, I know how it feels to be stretched in different directions to the point where you're not able to give proper attention to everything being done. So, I hope you take comfort in that you did what you could with the time that you had and that you've made the right decision. It sounds like you do.

Being able to use what you develop today to create new projects and then circle back to improve ChainBB will definitely be cool.

Sad to see this go, man. I often used it to browse for older blog posts. It was blazing fast and steemit.com doesn't go further than 9 months ago for me. (post limit?) Nice of you to send the forum investments back.

I did not have the chance to check out chain.bb.com but looking at the comments...it was clearly a valuable resource! Even so...it's always good to step away from projects that no longer motivate you in the same way and re-prioritize once in awhile to determine the best use of time and energy!

Sorry to hear that. I did look at the site a few times, but I tend to use Steemit out of habit. I see people are building a variety of ways to use this platform, so there will still be a choice. I'm sure you will do other great things.

I know how hard a dicision it would have been for you at this point. Am happy am getting more interested in seeing the amazing things you have for every one in your priorities. Am also happy at you achievements but am sorry that you feel sad about chainBB.

I must say am very proud of you and the mindset you put to your work. I encourage you and say all the best as your create and set up more priorities straight.

Thanks for keeping it real and refunding me. I think the concept is cool and will check out the open-source. @ADSactly is a community of open source developers who take on projects like this, maybe we can it run it by some of the members and keep it moving :)

Steem is a very distinct blockchain where there are posts and votes. There is value therefore in providing a way to work with these kinds of transactions as you did with chainbb.

On the other hand, a crypto-currency must have some local way to send funds and use the owner and active keys. The idea of putting private keys into a website like we do makes my stomach turn. That is why Vessel is an important project. Of course being a witness should be your core concern. Are you going to keep maintaining Vessel?

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How sad. But i can understand all the stress with this digital slavery. Nice, that you put the code public! Would be cool if it's not down, because the great idea behind. Thank you for your work on this project!

Hey @jesta ... I was surprised to suddenly see a refund and came about this announcement. Chainbb is a very unique platform and thanks for sharing it on GitHub . Looking forward to seeing your upcoming projects as I'm sure it would be a great one ! Cheers

I'm sad to see it go offline! I used it a lot for a while when I first came across it, but I kind of lost interest after all the changes to the community-driven boards that made it difficult to find good content there. But I hope that someone picks up the code in the future and builds upon it, because a Steem forum has a lot of potential!

I hope someone will create something like chainbb, I was using forums a lot and I liked chainbb because when you write something on a post it goes up and it was really helping people, and active posts can be rewarded there because they are visible always, not like in steemit, just upvoting bots win, bots making bots what ever your post is active or not. Very sad.

thanks for your honesty and the refund
this was a really cool project and I had hoped it would take off but it sadly did not. Thanks for your effort and hopefully we will see projects of yours pop up somewhere else

Hello I would like your support with an initiative that we have been doing for a long time, with an educational program called Recapacicla, from which I will upload material of all the work we have done, I have realized that we could help each other to help in poor neighborhoods of different places we have at the international level, we would be very grateful for your contribution as a witness and experienced in this platform, hoping you benefit our work in the short and long term .... it is necessary to devote due attention to the planet where we all live without returning anything in return greetings this is my presentation and waiting for your support @jestahttps://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@malorne3/una-vision-de-mundo

Aw, I'm sorry to hear this, @jesta. I've been away for a few months and came back and noticed the refund (thanks for that, by the way). I really like the chainbb model and got a lot out of using. Hopefully we can see it return one day bigger and better! But first and foremost is looking after yourself and putting your energies to what you feel is most valuable. Good luck in your future dev work, jesta. Cheers mate.

The feature of chainbb which I like most is that users can read an author's posts from the very beginning. This feature is nowhere else available. Chainbb is a great job. Thank you very much for your effort!

This still has massive potential @jesta. I don't blame you for wrapping this up for now. You have done some amazing things for this eco system. Hopefully someone picks up on this project in the near future! This would be a great place for people from the Bitcointalk.org site to start using if they wanted to participate in the Steem blockchain.

@jesta, I am interested in ChainBB and also in other Steem.IT services/products like chainbb and I would like to get instagram lookalike on windows as well and like facebook or twitter and linkedin (biz purpose) as well I would like give some advises if steemit owner is looking for it !!